Macross Dynamite
by Gerald Tarrant
Summary: Just how DID anima spirita seal the Protodeviln during the Protoculture Civil War, and will those who possess this mysterious power keep using it for good...or evil? An AU version of the Dynamite OVA, with characters from the entire Macross universe.
1. Prologue: Russian Roulette

I think I uploaded this to ff.net once upon a time, but it seems to have disappeared when they did their big server switch/move thing. So here it is again. This is a sequel of sorts to my Macross 7 fic "Angel Voice" so please read that before reading this. Macross and all characters are property of Bandai, Big West, FiX, Studio Nue, and Manga Entertainment. Original characters property of Gerald Tarrant.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.  
lordofmerentha@yahoo.com

* * *

**MACROSS DYNAMITE  
Prologue: Russian Roulette**

**Unexplored Territories, Quadrant 9, Macross 7 Fleet, Battle 7**

"Captain, there's a call for you."  
Maximillian Jenius decided that there was nowhere aboard this fleet he was safe – not on the bridge, not in the library, not while visiting his wife, and definitely not in his own quarters, where he was trying to cook some spaghetti. He hadn't had spaghetti in a while. When Sally Ford had found out he was cooking for himself, she had been horrified, offering to find him a cook to take the chore off his hands. When he'd told her he enjoyed cooking, she looked at him like he'd lost his mind.  
_I hate cooking_, she'd said. _But if you say so, sir._With special emphasis on the _sir_ and a skeptical gleam in her eye that told him she doubted the quality of his cooking.  
Well. Milia liked his spaghetti. So there.  
"Captain, are you there?"  
"Just a second," he called, wiping his hands on his apron and folding it neatly over the back of the chair before hurrying over to press the on switch on the monitor. The aroma from the meat sauce made his mouth water, and he hoped this was a quick call. Sally's face appeared on the screen. "Yes?"  
"It's the commander of the Varautan defense force. Shall I put her on screen in your room, sir?"  
The commander of the Varautan defense force had once been the executive officer aboard Battle 5 before the Protodeviln had destroyed Macross 5 on Lux, and was one of the few fleet officers that Max had ever admired. She was tough and smart and she reminded him of Hayase Misa. Maybe that was why he admired her. And she probably wouldn't appreciate it if he took the call in his quarters with pots and pans steaming in the background. "No, I'll take it on the bridge. Tell her to please hold and I'll be up shortly."  
The lift was empty and it took him only half a minute to turn off the stove, shrug into his uniform jacket, and to get up to the bridge and to his seat. Exedore was there, but looked like he was dozing. Max didn't bother to disturb him. There was very little for the Zentradi advisor to do aboard Battle 7 nowadays. He was almost always on the Einstein anyway, but he claimed he liked to come back now and then to check up on them, though he almost always ended up going to sleep while he was there. Max didn't mind. It was a little piece of nostalgia.  
"This is Captain Maximillian Jenius," he said, as the visual came up on his screen of a small but fierce-looking micronized Zentradi woman in a UN Spacy uniform, long blue hair pulled about her shoulders. "What can I do for you, General Korhyk?"  
Korhyk raised her eyebrows. "Still as polite as ever, I see."  
"It's against my nature to be impolite to a woman, ma'am."  
She laughed. "Is that so? By the way, it's a shame your daughter didn't want to come to the University of Varauta, Captain Jenius. We have some very fine programs here, if I can say so myself."  
Max grinned wryly. "Mylene is old enough to make up her own mind, and I think she wanted to stay close to home."  
"I understand that." Korhyk's smile faded and she straightened, all official business again. "And as much as I'd like this to be a pure courtesy call, captain, I'm afraid we have precious few of those to spare nowadays."  
"No matter," Max said. "It's always good to hear from you. Is everything all right?"  
"You asked to be informed if we came across any more Protodeviln or Protoculture finds."  
"And you've found some." It was not a question. Korhyk wouldn't have bothered calling halfway across the galaxy if they hadn't.  
"I don't think it's anything we haven't seen before, but it's a rather big find and I thought you would like to know. You've probably heard all about it on the Galaxy Network anyway."  
"No, we haven't heard anything..." he paused. Wait, there had been that one brief bit..."well, there was something billed as big news a few weeks back about a Protoculture dig on Varauta, but it faded rather quickly, so I didn't pay much attention to it. Was that it?"  
She nodded. "We've got some researchers working on analyzing the data right now, and if there are any new developments, I'll keep you posted."  
Beside Max, Exedore stirred. "Data? What data?"  
Korhyk glanced to the side, and Max knew she could see Exedore out of the corner of her viewscreen. "Advisor," she said, mock-sternly, "you're getting lazy in your old age."  
"Nonsense," Exedore said, his creaky voice amused. "I am merely enjoying my well-deserved rest. Is there any way I could perhaps access this data?"  
"I thought you might be interested. I'll transmit all the data we have so far on the finds to your historical office on City 7 as well as the Einstein 7 and your battle analysis records division aboard Battle 7. We've just gotten underway with the project but there isn't much."  
"A little is better than nothing," Max said. "Especially if this might be important."  
Her bright Zentradi gaze met his. "I wouldn't bother you otherwise, Captain. You'll see what I mean when you read what I send you."  
"Most interesting," Exedore said, stirring. "I will of course be examining the reports rather closely when they arrive."  
Korhyk gave a curt nod. "If you need further information, you should call the point of contact directly. I'll include her information."  
"Who is the contact?" Exedore wondered.  
"She's the best archaeologist and scientific analysis researcher we've got. She's only been here for a year – immigrated from Eden recently, but her name's already made it to the top of the galactic science circles. You even might have heard of her. Myung Fang Lone Dyson."

  
**Varautan System, Third Planet, Varauta City**

The contact in question was sprawled out on the couch in her living room, listening to the kettle whistle merrily on the stove and hoping Isamu could get breakfast on his own today so that she could enjoy a few minutes more of peace and quiet before she had to leave for work. In the kitchen, she could hear the clanging of utensils and the top of the bread box being opened, then a startled yelp.  
"Myung!"  
"I've told you to watch your head," she called, not bothering to get up. He did the same thing every morning. "The ceiling's low there. Then again, one of these days you're going to get a callous on your head from bumping it so much, and then it won't matter. "  
Her husband emerged from the kitchen with his breakfast in one hand and his work bag in the other. "You're cruel."  
"I know," she said, getting up from the couch to kiss him goodbye, hoping her tiredness didn't show. "Have a good day."  
Apparently it did, because Isamu glanced at her, concerned. "You're wearing yourself out again. Stop it. I swear I'm seriously going to go down to the research lab at the school and give them a piece of my mind."  
Myung laughed. "I'm putting in my own hours on this, so it's not their fault this time. Besides, I've got a new project. That Protoculture dig, remember."  
He raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah, how's that going anyway? It was big news a few weeks ago but the media seems to have forgotten all about it already, huh? Though I guess that's good for you."  
She shoved him towards the door. "You'll be late for work. I'll tell you about it when you get home."  
He kissed her quickly, then was outside in two steps. "See you later." The door slammed.  
Myung leaned against the wall, watching the sun rise through the sheer curtains covering the window. Isamu had left the radio on in the kitchen and it was blaring some unidentifiable song – Fire Bomber again most likely. She didn't keep track of the hit charts anymore…she couldn't even remember when she'd stopped listening to the radio, but somehow these past few years, she had. The radio and the charts had been a passion of hers in grade school, when she'd had dreams of becoming a singer, but after Sharon Apple, she'd decided she had enough of the music business altogether and had gotten out of it. For good.  
Isamu said it wasn't for good. Isamu said that she'd get back into it sooner or later, but Isamu said a lot of things. She'd gone back to school on Eden and discovered that she had a passion for archaeology almost as fulfilling as the one she had had for music, almost as large as the passion Isamu had for flying.  
But apparently Isamu's passion for flying hadn't overtaken his passion for her, because one year after Sharon Apple, when the uproar over the fiasco at the Macross celebration had died down and everyone had gone back to their normal lives and forgotten about her, he'd asked her to marry him. Both of them had known that it would happen. She had thought that Guld's death would hang over them like a pall of sadness, but instead it was almost refreshing to think about him, as if he was giving them his blessing.  
They both missed him, but that was the way of things.  
Isamu had been the first to hear about the Protodeviln, being high enough in the ranks of the UN Forces that he would be privy to that sort of thing. He'd scoffed at the idea of using reaction weapons against them. _If they're the people who created the Supervision Army,_ he said, _it's useless. Even the Grand Cannon couldn't stop Bodolzaa then. And from what I've been hearing from people, the Supervision Army was at least a hundred times as powerful._  
She'd wondered how the Supervision Army had been defeated, and he had shrugged. _I have no clue. Apparently no one knows. They just were._  
After she'd gotten a job at the UN research lab on Eden, she'd heard bits and pieces of the story, about something called spiritia and the power to seal Protodeviln. She didn't pay much attention to it. As long as they were safe and she could go about her research. When Isamu had been transferred to Varauta to head up flying operations there, she'd applied for a position at the University of Varauta's research lab, not thinking she would get it. For a lab that had been established for just two years, it had a high reputation.  
But she had gotten the job. And now she had gotten the directorship of what they were calling the "Protoculture Find," a network of caves in the mountainous wilderness outside the capital city, caves filled with…things.  
She wasn't sure what the things were. Apparently it was her job to find out.  
The kettle was still whistling, and she wanted a cup of hot tea before work. It would be a long day and she could use the caffeine. Taking one last look at the sunrise, she went to look for a teacup in the dishwasher, because Isamu refused to do the dishes.

  
**UN Spacy High Command Fleet Satellite, Earth Orbit**

"It's not that I disagree with the policy, sir," the man on the screen was saying for the billionth time, eyebrows drawn together in a tight frown. "It's just that-"  
"We don't have the funds. I understand, General. Put in a project scale back request and see what Maintenance Command can do with it."  
"They'll never allow it," the commander of the Fourth Quadrant Fleet said mournfully. "Combat Command wants all the VF-11s cut by next year, and Grayson will have my head."  
"Tell Grayson I'll have his head if he doesn't back down."  
The man sighed. "I'll talk to him. Thank you for listening, Admiral. I'll call back." The screen flickered and blanked.  
Fleet Admiral Britai Kridanik, UN Spacy commander, stood up from his chair and paced to the side window of his office, watching the VF-11 patrols flash back and forth outside and the busy whir of the maintenance drones on the docking platforms as they puttered from one craft to another. The office lights were a little too dim and the air conditioning didn't quite work, but all in all, it was a nice office. He'd have preferred the bridge of his old craft, but the UN Spacy commander just couldn't go galloping around the galaxy in a Zentradi flagship anymore. It was improper, and if nothing else, Britai had a keen sense of what was proper and improper.  
Right now, the only thing he could think of that was improper was the insistence of the UN Combat Command that they could have the VF-19 phased in by next year. It had been five years since the fighter had started being mass-produced, and they were nowhere near the projected number of ten thousand that Shinsei Galaxy had promised by 2050. And the UN Spacy had not the funds to give Shinsei Galaxy what they were asking for in order to complete the remaining craft for the order. Furthermore, the VF-11s they still had were perfectly functional, and Grayson was advocating widespread decommissioning of the craft altogether.  
Sometimes Britai had to admit he just didn't understand humans. This was one of those times.  
That was not the biggest problem in the military right now, but it was the easiest to deal with, so Britai dealt with it. He didn't want to think about the other problems if he didn't have to – Protodeviln, Protoculture, the Supervision Army. Anima Spiritia, whatever that was.  
He had thought the battle was over with the defeat of Quamzin's fleet, but apparently that had just been the signal for a long period of hiatus in which they sat and waited. And then sat and waited some more.  
Britai Kridanik was Zentradi by birth, and that meant he was a warrior. And sitting and waiting for the enemy to show himself was not a tactic that he had in his blood. But unfortunately, it was the humans' way of doing things, and though he didn't understand it, humans had proved to be intelligent in the way of strategy. So he let the military sit and wait, while internally, instead of preparing their resources and training their troops, commanders argued about the prices of new fighters.  
It was like playing Russian Roulette. He'd read about the game once and thought it a particularly interesting premise, pointing a gun to one's head with a single bullet in the chamber. The UN Spacy was playing Russian Roulette with itself, and sooner or later, they would lose. The bullet would find its way out of the chamber into the barrel and into the brain, and the military would self-destruct. He'd seen it time and time again as a commander in Bodolzaa's fleet, except it had been on a much accelerated scale, because Zentradi didn't like to sit and wait. It had been how new warlords assumed power – the previous warlord's fleet would tear itself apart internally, and then it was a simple matter of a show of force. Whoever had the most ships claimed the prize.  
Sometimes he even wished it was the case with the UN Spacy, because it would be much simpler.  
They'd almost lost with the reaction weapons. General Cleric, the former commander of Combat Command, had gone ahead and told the fleet to use reaction weapons against the Protodeviln if necessary. He had neglected to mention this fact to Britai, as well as the fact that he'd basically abandoned the Macross 7 fleet to its own fate. Britai was concerned for the welfare of all the colonization fleets, but he had friends aboard the Macross 7, and he had not been pleased with Cleric, to the point where Cleric was now Colonel Cleric and Lieutenant General Kevin Grayson was now commander of Combat Command….though Britai was now beginning to wonder if that appointment had been a mistake as well.  
He wondered if Exedore had ever heard of Russian Roulette. The archivist would probably find it a fascinating study.  
He missed Exedore these days.  
The air conditioning machine creaked and died yet again, and Britai sighed. If he had been any other man, he would have said he was getting too old for this, but he really didn't think that was the case. He'd been the commander of the UN Spacy for thirty-three years, and he anticipated being the commander for some years yet. He was just restless. He needed to be out there, among the men, not fighting this war from behind a desk.  
Regardless of what his staff said, there was a war. The Protodeviln might have been defeated, and the Supervision Army scattered, but that didn't mean it was over. To be a Zentradi meant to be always prepared, and Britai Kridanik was always prepared.  
It was the rest of his command that was the problem.

  
**Zola**

The waves lapped gently against the wood boards of the dock, and Elma's lantern cast little bobbing lights on the water. If she squinted hard enough she could pretend they were fairies. Water fairies, maybe. Her mother had told her stories when she was little of water fairies, who could fly in water like birds flew in air, and brought presents to those who believed in them.  
She bent closer to the water, trying to see if they were really there, and lost her grip on the lantern. It fell into the harbor with a splash, sinking quickly. The light went out.  
Elma sighed.  
The docks were deserted at this time of the evening, except for the occasional fishing boat that would putter by quietly, the shadowy figures of fishermen moving about busily on the decks. Behind her, the radio loudspeakers recited the story of Zomeo and Zolliette for the tenth time tonight. It was always the same episode. She wanted to hear a new episode, but word was that the voice actress who had played Zolliette and also wrote the storyline had grown tired of the project and quit, and no one was willing to put it up for grabs again. So it was forever stuck at six episodes.  
"_That night, Zomeo crept to the forest, with the moon shining down on his determined face. 'I cannot go back to Macross 11!' he thought to himself, with much sorrow. The trees…_"  
Elma tuned out the radio, resuming swinging her legs over the dock and mourning the loss of her lantern for a minute before deciding that it wasn't worth it. Around her neck, the strange snake-like creature she called Cappy nuzzled her gently, and she petted it. Cappy was getting tired. And it was late anyway. She should be getting back home. Her father would be worried, and Liza didn't like her sneaking down to the docks at night, though she knew her sister would never say anything.  
She got up to go and noticed a strange light on the water. For a second she thought it was a fairy, and she clapped her hands to her mouth, but no, it was only a reflection, a reflection from something high in the sky. She craned her neck, trying to see.   
A shooting star?  
But no, it moved too regularly to be a shooting star, and it was too bright. A ship? There were no ships out at this time of night, and it was not whale hunting season yet.  
Maybe it was an angel.  
That's what it was, she decided, and stuck her tongue out a bit, deep in thought. She'd never seen an angel before. It had to be one. A Zolan angel.  
"Zolan angel," she said to Cappy, who squeaked his approval as they padded silently off the dock onto the dirt road towards home. "That's nice. I like it."

  



	2. One: What Planet Is This?

_Macross and all characters are property of Bandai, Big West, FiX, Studio Nue, and Manga Entertainment. Original characters property of Gerald Tarrant.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.  
lordofmerentha@yahoo.com_

* * *

**MACROSS DYNAMITE  
One: What Planet Is This?**

**Varauta System, Third Planet, Protoculture Ruins**

They'd set up a temporary lodging area for those who wanted to stay on-site at the dig, and there was an office across from the makeshift campsite. Especially considering the climate on this part of Varauta consisted of mostly windy, partly-cloudy days, Myung wasn't sure if those staying in the campsite were addicted to the adventure of the great outdoors or just workaholics to the point where they couldn't bear to leave their dig. Or maybe they were just insane. There were a lot of those kinds of people in the archaeological field.  
The office wasn't much of an office to someone like her, who was used to the neat, modern conveniences of a research lab at the University, but for some reason the one-room office with its battered field equipment and makeshift cubicles was strangely refreshing, and it made her feel like a real pro. She was the first one there this morning, and as she opened the window to let some air into the musty room, she could smell the aroma of cooking sausages from the campsite. Breakfast time.  
"Morning, Professor Dyson."  
Her research assistant, Ildik Frianjik, was several years younger than she was, half Zentradi with a shock of bright blue hair, very intelligent, and a Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three. By all rights, he should have been the supervisor on this dig, and he told her that he'd been offered the job. But he had declined, saying that someone with his youth should probably watch and learn instead, so she'd offered him the job of research assistant, which meant long hours of trudging back and forth through the caves, taking notes and cataloguing every little fragment as fast as the diggers could uncover them. By the end of the first week, Ildik had joked that the work was a lot harder than he had expected, and he probably would have been wise to accept the supervisory position instead. Myung had thought of Supervisor Gordon, riding back and forth between caves in his car, stopping only briefly now and then to give instructions and who always went home no later than four o' clock in the afternoon, and silently agreed.  
Ildik looked rested this morning, though – he was one of those who was camping out at the dig at the campsite, and she thought that the camaraderie there would do him good. He was young yet, and needed the company. In fact, most of the seventy members of the team were young, most of them students working towards their masters degrees or young archaeologists just out of school. The researchers were a little older, but not by much. Myung was among the oldest of the team, and though she didn't usually think of herself as an older woman, she sometimes felt as such around this crowd. And with the summer program that the University was offering, for undergraduates on and offplanet who wanted to experience the dig firsthand to spend a month there with the team, she'd feel even older.  
No use worrying about that now, though. Growing older was just a part of life. "Good morning," she called over to where he was standing by the door, putting on his field boots. "Did you get anything else done yesterday after I went home?"  
"Nelson and I organized some of the smaller recording disks that we'd found in cave 17A, but other than that, no. A few of the girls went into town last night and came back with some beers and barbeque, so we had that instead." His eyes were anxious. "Was I supposed to have done something more?"  
She waved his anxiety away. "Good lord, no. You do enough as it is. You make me feel lazy sometimes!"  
"Well, you're married, Professor. You've got other responsibilities too."  
Myung laughed. "Very true." She slipped her own work boots on, clipped her voice data recorder on securely, and grabbed her notepad. "We ready to roll?"  
"Ready when you are, ma'am."  
The sturdy dig car was large by vehicle standards, but comparing it to the size of the caves in which the dig was located was like comparing a human to a Zentradi. Myung could hardly believe, when she'd seen the caves for the first time, that no one had ever located them before. True, they were located on a rather desolate part of the peninsula away from the main city, and the first patrols that had been in this area had dismissed them as a rather odd rock formation because of the forest that had grown up around them. It had only been about a month ago that a couple, hiking through the forest for a place to camp, had stumbled upon these caves.  
The University had gone nuts over the find and rightly so – the only other widely known Protoculture find had been on a planet settled by the crew of the Macross 2 about nine years ago – and it was exactly what the Varautan government needed to put the planet on the map. It had been three AM when Myung had gotten the call, and she'd had to ask the babbling woman on the other end to calm down and speak slowly, because she hadn't understood much of what was initially said. Eventually, it came out that these caves weren't just caves, but evidently had been a Protoculture scientific testing center of some sort. Myung had been astonished at first, excited until the woman amended her statement by saying that most everything in them was in pieces, probably destroyed during the Protoculture civil war millions of years ago.  
Still, it was huge while the frenzy lasted. The news was all over the city newspaper by the next morning, and then over the Galaxy Network by the evening. She wasn't surprised when Isamu had come home that night mentioning something about how odd it was that they'd gotten a call from UN Spacy Headquarters on Earth from General Someone-or-other who Myung had never heard of and who seemed to be important, who was asking about the find. The media had jumped on the story at first, but as with most archaeological finds, digs took time, and the media was impatient and soon wandered off for other, fresher, news. She was rather glad of that, actually. She hated working with the media breathing down her neck. She'd had enough of that with her old Sharon Apple days.  
There were no ruins in the very mouth of the cave. The ancient testing center seemed to have been built with defense in mind, and the decaying ruins of the main doors were located several smaller caves back, in what the team had labeled "Cave A1" on all official documents but was usually simply known as "Entrance Cave." Past the doors, the caves them split into a labyrinth of passages, each mapped and named, each containing a treasure trove of Protoculture data tapes and artifacts. The first few days, they'd tried to play the data tapes, but they wouldn't fit into any of the playback machines, and most of them seemed to be too scratched to be able to play, anyway.   
Gordon had wanted to ship the tapes back to the school and deal with them later, but Myung had convinced him otherwise, and one of the top electronics corporations on Varauta was now working overtime to deliver a playback machine that would be able to hopefully access the data in the tapes.  
The team was beginning to trickle in as Myung and Ildik stopped the car in Cave C1. The stack of tapes they'd been cataloguing was just as they'd been left last night in the far right corner of the cave, and Myung activated her voice recorder, making sure it was set to record her voice over the noise of the rock drills that they were using on the other end of the cave.  
"Sample from Cave C1," she said, thumbing through a set of data disks that looked like they'd been through a thousand Space War Ones. "Class Three data disks, number five. These are by far the most battered disks we've found so far in any of the C caves."  
"I wonder what that means?" Ildik mused from behind her where he was seated on a rock, scribbling on a notepad.  
"That depends what the motives of those who destroyed this place wanted," Myung said, debating whether to turn her recorder off, but decided to leave it on just in case her musings produced anything important. "If they were looking to destroy something in particular, it might mean that the data in this section of the caves was valuable. Or it might just mean that the enemy that was here did an especially thorough job."  
"Or maybe they were looking for something," Ildik said. "And then destroyed the rest to leave no trace of evidence."  
Myung looked at him. "What do you mean?"  
"I know we're only a week and a half into the dig, and I should never assume," Ildik said, "But I do find it extremely odd that this section of the caves has half destroyed records and documents, while the researches in the B section of the caves found no data disks whatsoever."  
"I haven't had a chance to talk to the people from B yet," she said, narrowing her eyes, and remembered to switch off the recorder before continuing. "We're not scheduled to conference till the end of this week. You're sure that's what they said?"  
"We were just throwing ideas around the fire last night and that's what they told me."  
"Hmm." She turned off her voice data recorder. "That's extremely interesting." Turning over the battered disk in her hand, she stared at it, as if its cracked case could offer some answers. "Keep taking notes. If that's the case, we'll find out soon enough, when the bigwigs feel like letting us know their opinions."  
"Shouldn't we be offering some of our own?"  
"If they let us," Myung told him. "We shouldn't push our luck until we know just what they want out of this thing. Sometimes they'll listen, and sometimes all they want is a little fame and money. And that's when we should shut up and keep our opinions to ourselves."  
"I suppose." He sounded doubtful.  
"Don't be pessimistic yet. We've only just started." She smiled at him, at his long face and the pointed ears that seemed out of place on an otherwise very human countenance. "And we'd better get moving. I want to finish this cave before lunch."

**Zola**

The attack came out of nowhere, and he flung himself to the side as the bullets hit the dock, hoping he didn't scratch his guitar in the process. It was always funny to most people who had ever known him that he seemed to value his guitar more highly than he valued his own life, but Basara didn't think it was funny at all. That was just the way things were supposed to be.  
Out of all places for an attack, he wouldn't have thought a fishing dock would have been likely. He cursed under his breath as the gunshots continued, briefly considering covering his head to try and protect himself, then decided against it. If a shot hit him, his hands wouldn't provide much adequate shielding anyway, and if he was hit in the hand, that would be the end of his guitar playing days.   
The gunfire crackled again and there were shouts. Over the noise of the firefight, he could hear a loudspeaker in the background playing what seemed to be a radio drama about someone called Zomeo. To think of it, that same drama had been on at the spaceport last night when he'd landed. Not to mention the fact that most everything here seemed to begin with Z. The planet's name was Zola, but he thought that was going overboard a little.   
Definitely the strangest planet he'd ever been to.  
He had spent the night in a little hollow overlooking the bay just a few miles from the spaceport. Urban areas seemed to be sparse here, and it had been a little unsettling to someone like him who had lived in City 7 for so long. The sight of so much vegetation had taken him aback at first. But he decided he liked it. It was good to be back on a planet's surface once more, to feel the dirt under his fingers and to know that he was singing to a landscape that would sing back to him in its own language.  
_I hope you find a million things. A million and one things, even._  
If Mylene could see him now, she'd give him a lecture to make his ears fall off, but he wouldn't have minded. He missed her already. She was probably happy at school, entering her second term and dazzling all of her teachers. He had no doubt about that.  
A bullet pinged near him and he grimaced, wondering what on earth people were doing with guns at night on a deserted dock. Then decided that it didn't matter, that it was time to see what he could do about it. Grabbing his guitar, he jumped up, knocking over some startled birds, and waved his free hand.  
"Oi! Hey, you, stop shooting and listen to my song!"  
It wasn't quite the same on the acoustic guitar, but it was good enough, and he launched into the beginning of New Frontier, hoping they'd at least be startled enough to decide he was nuts and maybe give up their fight. 

_Furimuku na itsudatte  
Jonetsu no mukausaki ni  
Soko wa kitto aru_

"Hey weird guy, get out of here! This is the police!"  
He spun around, still playing, and found himself face to face with a woman, a woman with a shock of bright red hair and long pointed ears.   
She was pointing a gun at him.  
He'd had guns pointed at him before. He didn't even look at the weapon, just stared her in the eyes and kept singing.

_Kudake chiru hoshitachi yo  
Atarashii hikari to nare  
Yami o keraseyo!_

"What are you doing?!" she demanded hotly. "Hey! HEY!" Waving the gun. "Don't you know this is a battle? Get out of here!"  
She sounded like Gamlin used to, Basara realized with a sort of nostalgic amusement. Her angry eyes held a kind of strength that he hadn't seen in anyone's eyes in a long time, and he decided that she was someone who could help him, if he could get her to understand his song too.

_It's a new frontier!  
Sou sa oretachi koko ni iru to  
Kane o uchinarase_

"I'm telling you!" she cried, still pointing the gun at him, but he could see she was confused. "If you don't get out of here-"  
There was no warning, just the crack of a shotgun and a stabbing pain in his shoulder. The guitar fell from his numbed hands and clattered to the deck, and he felt himself falling, not able to stop. He thought he must hit the ground sometime soon, but he just kept falling, and he realized that he'd rolled off the dock in the process and was now heading straight for the rocks below, where the tide was beginning to come in.  
_Dammit_, he thought, before he hit the ground with a thud that knocked the wind out of him and would probably have hurt if not for the fierce throbbing in his back and shoulder that made all other pains seem inconsequential. The water lapped over his right hand and arm and he tried to move it but found that it caused too much pain to do so. So he gave up.  
He heard the coughing of another boat engine and someone female talking frantically and quickly on the radio, someone who he assumed was the woman who had pointed the gun at him. It wasn't she who had fired at him though. The shot had come from behind. He couldn't hear what she was saying. His heartbeat was too loud in his ears. He felt hot.  
_I hope you find it, whatever it is. And I'll still be waiting._  
"Mylene," he whispered, and he saw light swimming in front of his eyes and wondered if he was dying.  
The last thing he knew was a cool hand on his forehead, pushing back his hair, and soft words half-murmured into his ear between the lapping of the waves onto the sand.

**Unexplored Territories, Quadrant 9, Macross 7 Fleet, Einstein 7**

The archaeology department was deserted at 7 in the evening except for a lone table at the corner of the student library, where one student was still studying, her long pink hair bound up into a tight bun at the back of her head, her nose deep in the textbook she was trying to decipher.  
"Mylene? You're still here?"  
She shook herself, blinking bleary eyes, and looked over to the bookcase by the library door where her roommate was standing. Chiye Jeong was half Korean and half Chinese, tall, slender, and very demanding. "I have been looking all over for you. Guvava is about to die of boredom, I think, and you're supposed to go see a movie with us tonight over in the City. What are you doing studying, anyway? We don't have finals for three weeks yet."  
"It's never too early to study," she said, yawning and stretching. "You all go without me, Chiye. I need to get this work done."  
"I don't think so," the red-haired girl said, tugging Mylene to her feet and throwing her books into the bag which lay open on the table with pens and notepads spilling out of it. "You're coming whether you like it or not. You study way too much."  
"I really need to do well on this test, or I won't be picked for the Varauta team! And you know how much I really want to be on the team."  
Chiye's face softened a bit. "Yeah I do. Mylene, you're the top student in the department. I really doubt you won't be picked."  
"That doesn't mean I don't have to work hard like everyone else," she said, but she found herself picking up her bag and heaving a sigh. "All right. No more studying. I'll come."  
"That's the spirit." Chiye grabbed her arm. "Seriously, stop stressing. Besides, it's you. Just seeing your name on the applicant list is enough to guarantee you a position."  
Mylene shook her head. "I hate it when that happens. Just because I'm me doesn't mean I should be given priority. Mylene Jenius the member of Fire Bomber and Mylene Jenius the university student are two very different people. At least, they should be."  
"You've been on Varauta before, though, haven't you? They could use you."  
"That was the fourth planet. Not the third planet." She sighed. "I really don't want to talk about it."  
Chiye looked down. "Sorry. I forgot."  
Mylene just shook her head and grinned, and they continued down the corridor and out the front doors of the building in silence. Since she had discovered her surprising liking for archaeology last term, she had been considering going on a summer dig for a while, and when the news of the Varauta project came out a month ago, she'd known at once that was the one she wanted. She'd called the department head, who said yes, it just happened that the team was looking for a summer group of undergraduate interns, and yes, they had two spots available, and would she like to put her name on the list?  
Her father didn't like the idea at first. He had no objection to her going back to Varauta, and had even suggested to her several times that she attend the school there, but the combination of Varauta and Protoculture seemed to strike a raw nerve with him. She hadn't admitted that it struck a raw nerve with her too, but that was one of the main reasons she wanted to go. The memories of what had happened on the fourth planet still haunted her, and it would be a good time to rid herself of the ghosts.  
True, she had been barely fifteen at the time, and everything had turned out all right in the end, but Varauta had been the first time she had truly realized what death meant and how permanent it was. She'd almost lost so many people there….her father, Gamlin, Basara and Ray and Veffidas. For some reason they were still all here, and she should have been satisfied with that, but she wasn't.  
_I feel like I left something unfinished there, Papa,_ she'd said. _And I need to go find out what it is._  
To her surprise, her father had nodded and simply told her to do what she needed to do. She hadn't told her mother yet. Though Milia was the one who had let her go on Operation Stargazer in the first place, so she didn't think her mother would have any objection. Milia was all about adventure.  
They arrived at the station just as the shuttle to City 7 made its final boarding call. It was all girls tonight – the men were all off doing their own thing, and Mylene didn't really even mind. The group of friends she'd made at the school were discrete and rarely ever pried into her private affairs, and the rest of her fellow students kept their polite distance. She'd expected to be bombarded with questions about Gamlin and Basara and Fire Bomber, but surprisingly, there were few of those, and as she kept her answers carefully neutral, the questioners had quickly gotten bored and left her alone.  
There had been a few boys trying to ask her out, but she had politely declined. Chiye told her later that she was developing a reputation for being unapproachable by members of the male sex, and she had laughed it off then. Later, she'd lain in bed and wondered why exactly she was being such a loner.  
_They don't think you're stuck-up, exactly,_ Chiye explained. _You're just…kind of off in your own little world, and they don't know how to take that. Most people don't. Lucky you have me around or you'd never get out of the library._  
It wasn't her fault she liked studying. Besides, it was a way to take her mind off other things.  
The shuttle's doors closed and it creaked out of the docking port onto the Milky Road, and she leaned against the window, watching the brilliant lights of the science ship fade in the distance. There was a Minmay song on the speaker system, and she tried to tune it out by thinking about her family back in the city. She had only been back to City 7 once or twice since the term had started, and really no time to visit either her parents or the rest of the band. With Basara gone, she didn't feel as guilty, but she knew her mother missed her.  
She still hadn't told anyone about Basara. Ray knew, but that was Ray, who figured everything out eventually. She missed Ray and Veffidas, and her bass, and she missed playing. But she missed Basara most of all.  
He'd never told her he loved her before he had left. He had implied it, but that wasn't the same thing, and now he was gone – had been gone for almost a year, and she let her eyes drift past the bulk of the Einstein, past the glitter of lights in the distance that was City 7, and into the blackness beyond where he was, somewhere, lighting up the galaxy with his song. At least, she hoped he was. She couldn't imagine him doing anything else.

_Toki ga nagareru  
Ai ga nagareru  
Watashi no mae o  
Kanashii kao shite_

"Mylene, lighten up!" Chiye's face appeared in front of hers, and she jumped. "Mou…it's supposed to be a night out, not another night for you to stare off into space. You do that enough!"  
"Do I?" she said weakly. "I hadn't noticed."  
"Come on." Her roommate tugged at her hand. "Smile, Mylene. Come on, just give me a little smile. What happened to the happy girl I knew at orientation?"  
Mylene rolled her eyes. "She got killed by an anthropology text book and eaten by her chemistry textbook, then was vomited up by physics and flushed down the toilet."  
Chiye groaned. "Oh please, spare me. You could make straight As without even trying, and you know it."  
Mylene didn't answer that, glancing at the clock and realizing that half an hour had almost passed and they were almost to the city. It was a Friday night. Maybe she would go visit her mother after the movie, spend the night or something if it wasn't too late. She didn't have much homework and she could do it on Sunday when she got back.  
Chiye tugged at her again. "You're so quiet. Stop thinking about school for once and come say hi to the other girls. It'll do you good."  
She let Chiye pull at her hand, keeping her eyes on the view outside the window as long as she could. If she was still living in the City, maybe she'd already be at her mother's place. Or maybe she'd be sitting with Ray, trying to compose a song for their next live. But she hadn't written songs in a while, not since school, and she didn't even know if she knew how anymore. After Basara left, the music seemed to have faded, and she wasn't quite sure how to get it back – not that it mattered, because wasn't this the point? To go away, to get away from the band for a while…to sort things out?  
"Mylennnneeeee."  
"All right, stop whining. I'm getting up."  
Would Basara be angry, if he knew? If he knew she wasn't keeping the faith? If he knew she wasn't holding the torch high, waiting for him to come back? What would he say to her application for the Varauta dig? Would he condone it or would he have scoffed, saying that it was a stupid idea, that she'd left that place years ago and there was no point digging up old ghosts?  
Sometimes she would open the door to her dorm room and expect him to be just inside, sitting in her computer chair or on her bed, doing that little chuckle in the back of his throat and smiling at her. But he wasn't, of course. He was long gone.

_Watashi wa kitto  
Okisarareru wa  
Ikusa no tame ni  
Hokori no tame ni_

It didn't matter what he would have said, she decided, dragging herself off the seat and following Chiye's retreating back out of the cabin. It only mattered what she thought, because she was here now and he wasn't.  
And maybe it was meant to be that way.  
Maybe he wasn't coming back.

_Toki wa nagareru  
Ai wa nagareru  
Kuchihateru…watashi wa_


End file.
